HOLLYWOOD -- In the 1972 film "Play It Again, Sam," Woody Allen's nebbish hero was so obsessed with Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca" that he enlisted the ghost of the legendary '40s tough guy to coach him on how to impress girls.
"Casablanca" and Bogey may have been the role models for Allen's generation, but as director Nora Ephron cleverly illustrates in her latest film, "You've Got Mail," which stars Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, it's Francis Ford Coppola's Oscar-winning 1972 classic "The Godfather" that's become the ultimate guy's movie.
Ephron also used a popular movie in 1993's "Sleepless in Seattle" to point out the differences between men and women's tastes. In "Sleepless," women blubber over the 1957 Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr weepy, "An Affair to Remember." Just as the men are clueless about the appeal of that chick flick, Ryan's perky bookstore owner in "You've Got Mail" is in the dark about "The Godfather."
In "You've Got Mail," Hanks plays Joe Fox, owner of a corporate book chain who is opening a huge new store in New York's Upper West Side. Ryan's Kathleen Kelly owns a small children's bookstore threatened by the opening of Fox Books. However, neither knows that they are e-mail pen pals.
When Kelly discovers Fox's identity after having met him in her store, she tells him she wouldn't have talked to him: "I didn't know who you were with," she says. That, of course, reminds Fox of a line from "The Godfather." He tells her that is what movie producer John Woltz told Corleone "family attorney" Tom Hagen when Hagen arrived in Hollywood to persuade him to cast the Godfather's godson, Johnny Fontane.
Fox also gives godfatherly e-mail advice to Kelly to "go to the mattresses" to save her business from bankruptcy and go to war against her competitor. When Kelly asks Fox what is it with men and "The Godfather," he informs her that it's the movie equivalent of I Ching -- the epitome of wisdom. If anyone has a problem, the answer can be found in "The Godfather."
Ephron, who co-wrote the film with her sister Delia, is quite familiar with the world of mob movies. Her husband, writer Nicholas Pileggi, co-wrote the screenplays of Martin Scorsese's gangster flicks "GoodFellas" and "Casino." (Pileggi wrote the books on which the films are based.)
